There are few more important aspects of homeland security than risk analysis, particularly in how the government allocates its resources, deals with threats and communicates with all its stakeholders including the public. And, the Department is working on improving things in this area.

Federal News Radio did an interview yesterday with commission chair John F. Ahearne about the report. It can be heard here.

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3 responses so far ↓

Thanks for posting this, an interesting read (at least the summary which is as far as I got). There are three gaps which spring to mind: first how to prepare for the “unknown unknowns” as Donald Rumsfield would say (or maybe the not-so-well-known unknowns): for instance, who had infrastructure failure in their hazard analysis before 2003?; second, how to balance and differentiate planning for events where we have prior knowledge of their impact (hurricanes, floods, etc) with never-happened-before-but-catastrophic events (prolonged power outage, nuclear attack, public health catastrophe); third, how to make all this comprehensible for Joe Citizen so we can all know what to prepare for and how (I recently blogged suggesting that people should do household hazard analysis before deciding what to have in their emergency kit: http://allhazards.blogspot.com/2010/07/what-do-you-really-need-in-your.html).